


Preparation

by Ladycat



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Crack, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-12
Updated: 2014-02-12
Packaged: 2018-01-12 03:02:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1181143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladycat/pseuds/Ladycat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beside her, Xander chuckled quietly in her ear as Spike stomped into the kitchen to fetch rags and cleaning supplies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Preparation

“It’s disrespectful! A travesty of nature, dammit. It just isn’t _right_.” Spike tried to make his point with an emphatic gesture, probably of the finger-in-air-emphasis-oeuvre. Unfortunately, that just knocked some of the pumpkin guts from his fingers to _splat_ against the wall, dripping like orange-y, seedy ichor onto the carpet.

Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at the congealing mess. “Not me!” Xander cried.

“Not me!” Dawn instantly echoed.

Spike muttered something dirty in what was probably a demonic language. Dawn privately believed that Spike wasn’t swearing so much as making up meaningless sounds to make her _think_ that he was—but it sounded cool and he did repeat some of them enough that she was pretty sure _she_ could repeat them, too. If she wanted to.

Away from the house, anyway. She didn’t need her mouth washed out with soap any more times, and why was it the vampire who turned into a stuffy prude when she cursed?

“If you think I’m cleaning this mess up,” Spike said in a low, threatening voice—and then abruptly stopped. Two pairs of huge, pleading puppy-eyes were looking up to him, thanks to Xander scrunching himself down onto the sofa next to Dawn, and hiding half behind her. “I am _not_ a—” Both sets of eyes blinked appealingly, Dawn even managing to squeeze out a tear or two to make her eyes _really_ big and glossy.

Spike made a wordless noise that sounded suspiciously like a whimper.

Beside her, Xander chuckled quietly in her ear as Spike stomped into the kitchen to fetch rags and cleaning supplies. They probably should’ve just brought them over, initially, but Dawn had been so bouncily excited at being able to carve her own pumpkin this year—with real knives, and not the dull crap that Buffy used to try and make her use just so _she_ could hog the carving—that Spike and Xander had been too busy trying to stop her from poking an eye out to bother thinking about cleaning up.

Drawers banged, cabinets slamming open and shut as Spike made his way through the kitchen, searching for various items.

“He sounds kind of like our own personal boo,” Xander whispered.

“Yeah, like the Sixth Sense kind.” That movie had creeped her out enough that she’d been _very_ grateful for Spike’s personal ghost stories afterwards. Oddly, despite his stories being _true_ they were a lot easier for her to handle. Maybe because they always ended with ‘and then I tore it to pieces, just like I’d do to anything that looked at you funny’. “The one that kept messing up the kitchen?”

“I heard that, you selfish prats! I am _not_ any kind of ‘boo’, nor do I find this at all amusing. It’s _Halloween_. I should be bloody asleep, not catering to the whims of a child and the boy who never sodding grew up.”

“Oh, hey! That’s what you can be, Xander: Peter Pan!”

Xander ignored a sulking Spike who muttered as he cleaned up the pumpkin guts from the floor before trying to remove them from his own body, instead lifting his legs to stare at them. “Um, not sure I can pull off the tights look, Dawnie. Mary Martin I’m, uh, really not.”

Giggling, Dawn kicked Spike before he could make any kind of comment. “But you’d be so _cuuuute_ ,” she pleaded.

“Yeah, you’d have to wax and everything,” Spike managed to get in, before Dawn kicked his stomach again. “And that is _enough_ , ’bit. I know I can take more abuse than lumpy over there, but that doesn’t mean it’s all right for you to do so.”

Privately, Dawn loved it when Spike went all prim and scoldy on her. It made her think of what Spike used to be like, before the demon and the insane girlfriend and the hundred years of history that had twisted him into who he was now. Sometimes she dreamed of a world straight out of _Pride and Prejudice_ , except Spike wasn’t Mr. Darcy, he was one of the foppish nobodies in the corner.

She usually woke from those dreams crying.

“Dawn. Dawnie!” Xander had an arm around her, Spike crouching at her feet and looking up into her eyes anxiously. She blinked at them, and then leaned into Xander’s arms, hands still firmly caught up in Spike’s. It was a good place to be, really, warm and comfy and safe and cared for.

“You okay, nibblet?” Spike asked.

“Yeah. Um. Can we go jump in the big pile of leaves out back now?” she asked, her smile weak but genuine—especially when Spike went into a predictable rant about cleaning up ground-leaves from the carpets for the next few weeks and that it was only him who was going to do it, dammit, while Xander bounced like a five year old and practically _dragged_ her outside so they could go play.

Yeah. This was a good Halloween.


End file.
